Movie Reviews
The Manchurian Candidate
Jonathan Demme is remaking this with Denzel Washington as Frank Sinatra, Meryl Streep as Angela Lansbury, and someone called Liev Schreiber as Laurence Harvey. Why do they do these things? Streep is very, very good, but Lansbury had one of the single greatest scenes in cinema history in the original; not even Meryl is going to be able to top it. The Manchurian ... Read more »
The Lucky Ones
Three soldiers return from Iraq, all of them damaged in some way. Rachel McAdams was shot in the leg, and it’s not healing well. Michael Peña is impotent. Tim Robbins is older, and functions as the father figure as the three hook up and pool their resources for a trip across America. This is a rather familiar story arc with discoveries and disillusionment, but it’s all handled well.
A Loving Father
Gerard Depardieu has just won the Nobel Prize for literature. (I know, it’s hard to swallow, but what the hell). On his way to Stockholm on a motorcycle he gets into an accident, is kidnapped by his son, played by Depardieu’s real son. The son is an ex-junkie, and blames Dad, as all junkies blame somebody else. Dad was a real prick, no doubt, and still is, if you believe that fatherhood is ... Read more »
The Man Without a Past
Quirky film from Finland’s most respected director. A man is robbed and beaten and loses his memory. Hollywood would have made a hash of this, but the new-born innocent falls in with a series of quirky characters, and I had a lot of wry laughs.
The Man With Two Brains
Watching this, I found myself musing about three funny men who having been making movies for a long time: Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, and Woody Allen. All three of them made films of inspired lunacy early on. Woody soon moved to gentler, human comedy and pure drama. Mel stayed true to his muse, such as she was, but after making seven movies that ranged from brilliant to damn good, followed ... Read more »
The Lovely Bones
I really liked the book. The movie, not so much. I often think that some books simply should not be made into movies, and this is one of them. Our narrator, a 14-year-old girl, tells us up front that she’s been murdered, and she is in some sort of limbo Heaven. In a book you can imagine this. In a movie, you see somebody else’s vision, and of course the SFX are amazing and beautiful, but ... Read more »
The Man With the Golden Arm
This is one of those groundbreaking films. When it was released, the MPAA would not give it a seal of approval, because it dealt with drug addiction. It had been sort of okay to portray a drug addict as a pitiful, twitching, wild-eyed maniac desperate for a fix … like a puff of the killer weed, for instance, as in Reefer Madness. But to show that an addict could ... Read more »
Lovely and Amazing
Four women, a mother and three daughters, all of them seeking attention, trying to cope with their insecurities. It’s all well done, well acted, and very uncomfortable. But it is also very honest, if you like that. If I’d been in a different mood I’d probably have liked it better … and I do recommend it.
Man With a Million
From a story by Mark Twain. Gregory Peck is a down-on-his-luck American in London without a farthing. Two rich brothers make a bet. They persuade the Bank of England to issue a one million pound note. One brother says that with such a thing, he won’t need to spend anything. People will be so eager to have his business they will shower goods and services on him, gratis, or bill him for ... Read more »
The Man Who Would Be King
At my very first meeting on my very first trip to Hollywood to talk about turning my short story “Air Raid” into a movie—at the Polo Lounge in the big pink Beverly Hills Hotel—I met three formidable people. I was intimidated. (Big time. Dustin Hoffman was at the next table.) One was Doug Trumbull, the SFX wizard behind 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The next was ... Read more »